Courtney Kehl

Hi, everyone. I am really excited to be talking with folks today here at Expert Marketing Advisors. Thank you so much for joining us. I hope you’re all staying safe and be strong. We’ll get through this pandemic together and I’m sure we’ll come out the other side with all new best practices amongst them, the social media ones.

Today we are going to dive into that topic specifically toward B2B tech company. One of the things that we’re looking to identify and for your key takeaways is, why are you using utilizing social media? What’s the end goal? Selecting which channels are right for your company, some best practices and some metrics around what content performs best and how frequently we should be posting. Then of course, strategies around growing your following and then tracking those all back to true results and KPIs. So with that I’d like to introduce, oh, just a little housekeeping note, please participate. We’ve got a couple of polls we’re looking forward to surveying everybody and getting that insight as well as please by all means put any questions or comments you might have.

We do have 10 care packs. I wish we had more. We are looking to add some more to our stock, but those of you that attend please the first 10, we’ll be able to give out these wonderful care packs. They’ve got everything from hand sanitizer to wet wipes, to even first aid and hanger pills are my favorite. Got to get through this together. So let us know. If you’re interested and we’ll be happy to reach out to you and send that out to you by mail. Great. So with that, let me introduce Kenzie Lee. She is an absolutely phenomenal and very passionate social media expert. Our number one primary social media expert that oversees tremendous results week over week. For all the folks that are looking to establish that trend and the footprint across channels. Okay. Oh, let’s take a minute.

Kenzie Lee

Thanks for the intro. And thanks everyone for showing up today. I’m really excited to dive in to social media with you. Like Courtney said, we’re going to be covering top three best practices. I really just want you to focus on that as I review it. Reminders throughout, if you have any questions feel free to throw that into the questions tab. So with that said, let’s dive in right here with our first topic.

So just want to give a quick overview of social and then identify those major KPIs that we recommend you pay attention to in B2B texts. First just to shout out to these three social media channels for B2B tech, again, this is what this is all about. We recommend that you have a presence on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, and this is an order.

So primarily LinkedIn is going to be the gold spot for B2B tech. LinkedIn is really where you’re able to reach those key decision makers, really connect with that more professional audience. That’s why we love LinkedIn. Twitter is amazing for reaching out to those key influencers in your industry and in your market. It’s also a great place for a lot of community engagement as well. Then lastly, Facebook. Facebook is sort of one of the first social media platforms. We like Facebook because of their analytics. You can, if you’re running Facebook ads, you can get on someone’s screen for less than a penny. That’s amazing for social media ads. So we really recommend using Facebook for paid strategy around AB testing. Then use what you learned from running Facebook ads and up-level all of that testing and start to run ads on Twitter and LinkedIn. Just because of that such amazing low cost that you get on face.

Just to highlight, we’re partners with sprout social. We absolutely love working with them. They found a statistic about LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook where these three channels contribute to 90% of social traffic for B2B sites. That’s another reason why we just absolutely love these three channels. So if you don’t already have them we highly recommend that you consider just moving forward in creating these channels.

Courtney Kehl

Those are definitely a great overview. But what stood out to me in that conversation was definitely the Facebook side of things. Because I am actually not a big Facebook user myself. But when it comes to marketing and being able to test things before rolling out to larger audiences and really putting larger budgets toward them. We have definitely found and I’ve seen these phenomenal sort of AB testing across the course of four to six weeks to identify the best look and the best keywords and so on and so forth. So really great point there, really great take away.

Kenzie Lee

Yeah, definitely. So then just right here real quick, we want to just throw this out. Just a way to optimize your three key channels on social media. We’ve identified the optimal profile image size, banner images, post image size and then the character count for each channel. Feel free to take a screenshot of this if you’d like. Also if you want a full overview of this full slide deck, you can download it in the attachment section below the screen here.

So just to point out just one little quick tidbit here. Twitter you’ll notice has the lowest character count. Just kind of the nature of that community. It’s just really short sweet messages. The life of a tweet is extremely short. It’s maybe five minutes long. And that’s why there’s so much content going on on Twitter. So just to kind of like call that out right there. But yeah, we just wanted to make sure you kind of had this as a reference for optimizing your channels.

So again, we’re focusing on B2B tech just overall what I would recommend for you to shift your mindset, if you haven’t already is to use social media as a brand awareness tool. Don’t try to force social media to be your lead gen tool. Social media is for sort of like building your brand that should be your focus and tie that back to your marketing goals.

With that in mind, the three key metrics that we like to look out for is impressions. That’s the total number of people that are viewing your content. That’s eyeballs on your posts. Then engagement rate. That’s just a metric calculated by engagements .An engagement is a comment, a share, a like, a video view. Then you take your engagements and you divide it by your impressions and you multiply that by a hundred and then you get a percentage. So it to be like 3%, 7% something like that. That would be like you’re posting engagement. So those are two just really important metrics of attention to, and then follower growth.

We are super focused on follower growth at Expert Marketing Advisors. We really like to generate followers on Twitter, especially. One of our favorite tactics is to do the follow and follow method. Where we go out and follow a bunch of people source from like industry, loved channels and just kind of engage with the audience and follow them, and then they they’ll likely follow you back. That’s just a really great way to just gain followers on Twitter. So again, these are the top three metrics, all sourced from viewing social media as a brand awareness tool.

Courtney Kehl

That’s great. One of the things to note as well is that all of these actually impact each other. So the more followers you have, the higher your impressions, and then of course, that kind of relates to better engagement rates as you put out really valuable content. So it’s important to the takeaways. They all have a way to influence on each other.

Kenzie Lee

This is the top three best practices. We’ve been using these for years now. They’re just absolutely solid. So I’m really excited to dive in with you right now. So the first one is the 80 20 rule. You might’ve heard of this before. It’s super, super important. I can’t stress this enough. So 80% of the content that you put on a social media should be curated content. That is content, not about your company. I know that might sound crazy but it makes sense. I’ll explain.

Curated content is really defined by industry-related articles, maybe a blog or a video, market reports. Just anything about the the realm of the industry that you’re working in. And then the 20% of content you should be putting out on social media should be the branded content. That’s content about your company, content that links back to your website. So if you want to promote your blog, a webinar, event, if you have a white paper, podcasts, anything relating to your brand, that should be 20% of the content in your social mix.

Courtney Kehl

This is a really great rule. Oh, sorry. I’m jumping in, but I do want to emphasize this rule. It’s tricky to stick to it and we hold ourselves accountable across the board as well and do audits at the end of each month to see if we were able to stay true to it. It really does help with your audience that cares about what’s going on in your market and your industry, but they have yet to really discover you as a company. So the roads will lead to you. As long as you’re talking about the industry specific problems and trends at the whole. Sorry I interrupted you with the other.

Kenzie Lee

No, that’s great. Yeah, that was awesome. Cause if you think about it, if your pages a hundred percent about you it’s really like, what value are you adding to the market and what value are you adding to your customers? If you’re just talking about yourself. So you definitely want to have like a really good balance of 80% of industry related content to grab people’s attention to your page. And right below here, we’ve just kind of thrown out a weekly cadence that you could potentially use.

Thursday you can see there, we have original posts promote demo video. Again, so this is just one day. Well you will be talking about your brand. I know that sounds crazy. But it works. I’ve been to this later, but we did a lot of research around what works best on certain days of the week. Thursday is amazing for original for B2B tech. Here’s just a really great example of what a week could look like for you.

So with that, I’ll move forward to our number two best practice rule, which is consistent post frequency. So we recommend for a lot of reasons to just find a post schedule your audience will know what to expect. From your page, from your brand and then the social media algorithm will just track what your page is about. So those are like two reasons why like posts, frequency is really important. So we recommend posting Monday through Friday, do not post on the weekends. It’s more of like people are like, their brains are shut off from work. It’s more about family and friends. You won’t get a lot of engagement on weekends. You might get a lot of unfollows on weekends. So we recommend staying Monday through Friday.

Then this calendar right here is just a really great example of a place that you can start today and kind of testing posts on social media. A really great, just general place to start would be just post once a day, Monday through Friday, kind of prioritize your content. Then just run that for 30 days, just commit 30 days. We’re going to do this 80 20 rule post consistently. Then after 30 days, I just encourage you to review all of your data, you know, see what days were hot days for your content. See which content was getting a lot of engagement, a lot of impressions, those metrics we talked about earlier and then really evaluate what works best for your brand and for your social media.

Really over time we found if you increase your post frequency your page is going to just really blow up in a good way. And so that’s ultimately what we recommend, but every brand is different. Maybe posting three times a week is really your jam. That is totally fine. But this is really a great place to start. Just run a 30 day experiment and see what happens.

Courtney Kehl

This a great, a really good cadence as well. It keeps that consistency. We were pushing out a poll to everybody. Cause we’d love to know where you stand and how often are you posting. Weekly or every other week monthly or maybe even more. Then of course there’s those of us that we’re just getting our arms around this and getting an understanding of that consistency. So encouraging you to vote there on the poll, that’s just popped up on your screen. Great. Thanks Kenzie.

Kenzie Lee

Okay. So number three, our last of our best practices would be post content. So this is just a breakdown of what a post should look like and what a post should contain itself. So we recommend using industry and company applicable hashtags. A great way to source industry related hashtags and brand related hashtags would be to look at your SEO keyword list. A hundred percent great place to start. And then over time it will kind of like do a little more research on social media and Follow certain trends and you’ll find like those optimized hashtags.

You definitely want to have brand related hashtags that could be your tagline or maybe a campaign you’re running, but definitely great to build up hashtags around your brand. Second point you always want to tag others in your posts. When someone’s tagged in a post, they get a notification that they’ve been tagged. Which increases their possibility of sharing the post or engaging with the posts, which is really what we want. Again, like engagement rate is a huge metric that we’re trying to pay attention to here. You want to make sure you tag an author of an article or your partners, maybe someone like CEO at your company made a quote. You want to tag them. Those are just great ways to engage the audience.

Then the third point there is shorten your CCA links. I think a lot of companies are actually good at this, but as marketers, we know those UTMs are like scary long and the character count on social is like quite short. So we want to make sure we’re using something to shorten links. We love to use Bitly. That’s a great resource bit dot L Y. Check it out if you haven’t yet.

Then the fourth best practice post point would be consistent branding across your social media and website. That would be that imagery and sort of that copy. You want to make sure the voice of your social media matches the voice on your website and the visuals on social media are going to match sort of that visual branding on your website. Because if you think about that journey from someone going from LinkedIn to your website, you don’t want it to be like black and white. You want it to be a very smooth transition, like, okay, if this is the same brand, like I understand. So that sort of those best practices around the post.

Courtney Kehl

This is great. I have two questions that have come in here. What do you recommend posting the same content on each platform each day? And then the other one is how do you find influencers? What do you recommend for tracking down people tag.

Kenzie Lee

Yeah, those are really great questions. So starting with, do you recommend posting the same content on each platform each day? I do recommend that for that 30 day social media experiment, just to define what’s working, what’s not working. You can evaluate across all three channels. Like maybe videos are killing it on LinkedIn, but Twitter, we’re not getting what we thought we would. So you’ll really learn over time a different social media strategy for each platform. But to start off, I’d really encourage you to just kind of have everything standardized for maybe three months, just run the same social strategy and then really learn about all of that data. And then you can adjust for each channel over time.

Then the second question where to find influencers? There’s a ton of research you can do. I’m sure you might already be aware of some influencers in your market. Those people that are speakers on events. All of the verified accounts on Twitter is a really great place to find those bigger influencers. There’s a bunch of people who just are really passionate about certain industries in tech. They write their own blogs. It does take a lot of research to find those influencers, but they are out there. I would recommend just kind of searching through Twitter and LinkedIn to find these people and maybe searching tech events and seeing who the speakers are. Those are really great people that you want to connect.

Courtney Kehl

Great. And then as we roll into the next section here on setting up your company profile and best practices for each of those channels, I’d like to poll the audience once again. We’re interested in knowing which top two social media channels your company uses to promote yourself. Present, we’ve got choices around LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, our top three, and we’ve added in Instagram. And would you believe we’ve also got Tik TOK? They’re so interested in knowing what you guys are using out there.

Kenzie Lee

Awesome. Okay. So next, we’re going to dive into company profiles. Just how to optimize your social media pages. So first we’re going to work with LinkedIn right here. I’m sure a lot of you maybe already have your LinkedIn profile set up for your business. Very first step is you want to, there’s a progression bar on the top. If you’re an admin you just want to make sure you’re checking all of those steps. All the way through the algorithm will recognize that you filled out your profile a hundred percent and then it’ll start like pushing out your profile a lot more. So make sure you have gone through all those steps first.

Just a couple key areas in your profile. I want to point out just that bio section. So for us, it says ‘Helping You Become Great’. You want to make sure you put maybe your company tagline there, or your value proposition statement, something that. If someone visits their page, they automatically understand what you do.

Then for the banner image so if this can be different, we like to use taglines are really great. Just to kind of represent what your brand is about for us right now, we’re running a campaign called re-imagined marketing. So that is our banner image. You can change your banner image out for any reason. If you want to promote an event, maybe you just want to like mix it up quarterly. It’s just really great opportunity for providing information to your audience. Then the profile image we just recommend, you kind of keep that consistent over time. Just your logo or your icon is just a really great thing to have in your profile image.

Then definitely want to link to your website again, that’s what the goal of social media is to kind of have brand awareness and then you want to drive traffic to your website, secondarily. So definitely want to make sure you’ve hooked up your visit website button. Then the next step is you want your employees to follow your page. The more people that follow your page, the more LinkedIn is going to push out your content. So that’s super important and definitely want to make sure your employees are seeing your content everyday. Cause they might be encouraged to share about your business. What’s better than that? People on the inside just like promoting you.

Then this is just a note to like personal profiles. We recommend joining Facebook groups. Facebook groups are incredible for just really connecting with this super targeted audience. There’s a Facebook group for practically everything out there you can search. Like, I don’t know, fans of llamas, I don’t know. Just something really obscure. There’s a LinkedIn group for anything.

Then just on the employee side for LinkedIn profiles, you want to make sure everyone on your team profile is optimized to represent your brand. A really great way to do that is to create employee social media banners that they can post to their profile. This kind of just makes your brand look put together as everyone on LinkedIn, like, wow, they really know what they’re doing. They are a team, they’re solid. So we really recommend just kind of having employee banners, optimizing their profile pictures, maybe to their profile pictures on your website. Just really kind of reflecting your brand in the best way on LinkedIn.

Courtney Kehl

Great tips. We have a question or more of a comment. I heard LinkedIn doesn’t like URL. Some insight on the URLs at LinkedIn.

Kenzie Lee

I am not sure what they are referring to in that, but yeah, so LinkedIn will kind of remove the URL and then if it’s an article, then it will just like push it out to like a clickable kind of box. So that might be what they’re referring to in that. But you can post a Bitly URL and it’ll be fine to work through, you know?

Courtney Kehl

Yeah. I found that experience as well. I think it’s when you have maybe multiple URLs or you know, it’s not your primary. You want to make sure population. But if we didn’t, if we weren’t answering that to the detail that that person was thinking of, please feel free to reach out to us. We’d be happy to discuss it more.

Kenzie Lee

Great. Yeah. Awesome.

Courtney Kehl

Alrighty. So let’s see here best practices by content type. So what are some of your takeaways there? Oh, did I just skip past Twitter? Sorry.

Kenzie Lee

No worries. Twitter is pretty similar to LinkedIn, obviously. We recommend having the same brand image, the same profile image on both profiles. Really quick note to the bio it’s something different between Twitter and LinkedIn is Twitter is the place where you want to use all the hashtags, like hashtag, hashtag all the hashtags. You want to make sure you include your brand hashtags in your bio and industry related hashtags in your bio that will just make your brand more discoverable on Twitter.

So that’s just a quick note about the difference between the two. Then you want to make sure, obviously your handle reflects your brand. It could be your tagline just something related to what you do and obviously your brand name. Again, link to the website, make sure you set up your, your Twitter profile a hundred percent as well. If your profile set up a hundred percent, Twitter will want to promote your profile more. It’s just, it makes the algorithm happy. So every single possible section that would also be including your location.

Courtney Kehl

Yeah, this is great. We definitely encourage the hashtag that started getting to know what works and what doesn’t. Start with your keywords, the keywords that you use in SEO and, and what you’re targeting across your website. Those are great place to start for hashtags.

Kenzie Lee

Yeah, definitely. Okay. So we’re going to review content type. We just did a study on a bunch of different posts over six months. We just aggregated all this data from LinkedIn and Twitter. We found out what types of content performs the best on which days we did all this research for you guys. So you don’t have to worry about doing it for yourself, this is a good place. You can take this data and start with it on your profiles and then see what works for you. Again, every page, every brand is different.

So just starting with that orange section, just kind of take a look at this. Maybe take a sip of coffee. This is a lot of data that we’re going to go over. Get ready here. So the orange section, we have the original and curated content which we talked about earlier is that 80 20 rule, 20% original, 80% curated. When executing the three strategies, the 80 20 rule consistent plus frequency. The post’s best practices. This is the data that we’re seeing.

On original post, we’re seeing an average engagement rate of 6.3%. That’s performance days, Wednesday and Thursday. You found that calendar earlier. We had Thursday as our original post day. Then for curated content, we’re getting about 5.5% engagement rate. Then obviously Monday through Friday, every day of the week is really a great way to post the curated. Then just right here, you can really take a look at this. I won’t really go through everything, but I just want to highlight the video engagement rate, which is extremely high. I feel like it’s kind of obvious for me. I know I watch a lot of videos on social media that really grabs my attention. So I think as much as possible, if you could work video into your social media strategy. We would highly recommend that it gets the absolute highest engagement rate on social media.

When you have a high engagement rate the social media platforms recognize that post is getting that. It’ll push that out to more. So it’s just makes the algorithm happy, which grows your channel and that’s really what we want to do again, as a brand awareness.

Courtney Kehl

I want to double click on that video, right? Because 8% is really huge. So one of the easy ways to really extend the life of your existing videos is break them up into smaller nuggets. So if you have a two or three minute video, you can look to take this sections of it, to create those 30 seconds posts which is an opportunity to get more life out of your existing.

Kenzie Lee

Yeah, 100%. And actually real quick, just as we see that dichotomy between the video and the blog. Blog gets like the absolute bottom of the barrel engagement rates. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t make blogs anymore. I think blogs are amazing for SEO purposes. But just so you’re aware, we find blogs aren’t performing very well on social media. So maybe if you want to add that into your mix less frequently but still offer it as content type. That’s fine. But just really interesting statistic that we found in this.

Then moving forward and we have a couple more content types that we evaluated as well. Again, to call out the high numbers here hiring posts do amazing, obviously. LinkedIn is where they really jam. And we found Monday and Thursday as the best days to post for hiring. Then influencer tagged content. So that’s where that’s maybe like curated content where you tag some big verified account, some big speaker from a tech event. If you tag them in a post, they will likely like it or reshare it. Having that engagement from some influential person in the market is amazing. Other people will see that and they will engage with that post. It was kind of just like a chain reaction, really. So we find like posting that any day of the week is incredible.

So these are just some other amazing. Things that we’ve found in this study. I think I want to call out the follow Friday as well. Follow Friday is really fun if you haven’t participated, I would recommend it because it’s a great way to get cross channel followers. How we like to participate is we’ll do on Twitter, we’ll say, Hey, happy Follow Friday? Follow us on LinkedIn. That is something that not a lot of people are doing. Usually people promote like hashtag Follow Friday or follow us on Twitter. Follow Friday is a really great opportunity to grow your audience on both on all of your channels, really. If you think about someone’s day and their day and engagement with social media. Someone might be on LinkedIn in the morning, and then in the afternoon they are on Twitter, but maybe they only follow you on Twitter. It’s just a really great opportunity to be a part of their day more. Yeah, love Follow Friday.

So just in summary real quick, we want to read the three channels, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. We highly recommend those. Then the three best practices that 80 20 rule, consistent posts, frequency posts, best practices, and then just recommend paying attention to those social media KPIs impressions, engagement rate, and followers. Then we went over the company profile optimization and help your team kind of grow their, their social profiles as well. Then we just went over those B2B tech content types, which I highly recommend if you haven’t downloaded the slide attachment yet, take a moment to do that now. So you can kind of review that data later.

Courtney Kehl

Love it. Thank you so much. I know we kind of went over a lot in very short amount of time, so we’re more than happy to discuss things with folks offline, as well as do a social audit and help you kind of get all set up and off to the races. Please feel free to reach out. Thanks so much. Kenzie it was a pleasure.

Kenzie Lee

Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for showing up today, everyone really appreciate it.

Courtney Kehl

Take care everyone, stay safe.

Kenzie Lee

Bye.